Dylan Thomas, that is, not Bob. OK, I’m fond of Bob’s work, and especially of Tambourine Man, but on this occasion what I have in mind is the Welsh wonder’s injunction to “rage against the dying of the light”. I’ve come back from my Italian trip in a strange frame of mind, stimulated (I’m sure) by the discovery of my relative unfitness, proneness to injury, and the general sense of being oppressed by the burden of getting things done. For the first time in my life I’ve come home believing that I need a holiday in order to recover from my holiday.
All of this comes into focus through the lens of an awareness of advancing age. I suppose that this is hardly surprising if I go mountain climbing with and eighteen-year-old, but objectively speaking it is a fact that cannot be ignored. The intensity of this feeling is sharpened by my wife starting to talk about a “bucket list” of things that we ought to do before we are unable to do them, and the future prospect that at some stage in the future we will need to move out of this house because it isn’t very suitable as a dwelling for the elderly.
There are, even so, sparks of new interest. During one of our rambles in Italy, around the military cemeteries of Monte Grappa, I encountered a poem that was included as a part of the circuit of informal memorials that make up the “Ring of Grappa”. It may be a crazy ambition bearing in mind my relatively limited Italian, but I set out today to try and translate it into English. I have to give a talk late in October, in support of the exhibition of my series of pictures on Italian Experience during the Great War, and it struck me that this might relate very well to that material. We will see.
It ought to be interesting tonight because my sister-in-law is coming to dinner. She was in her working life a professional translator, although from French not Italian. Maybe she will have some observations and advice.